At age 33, Reshma Saujani had a moment of bravery: Against all odds of winning, she ran for Congress. It was a serious long shot: People called her crazy, and said there was no way that she would win.

And, well, she didn’t.

But through her recklessness, the founder of Girls who Code learned an unexpected lesson. “It was the first time in my entire life where I had done something that was truly brave,” she says, “Where I didn’t worry about being perfect.” And that’s an experience, she’s realized, she wants more women to have from a young age.

Little boys are taught to climb high and swing hard, says Saujani, while little girls are taught to sit pretty, to get all A’s. We’re teaching our girls to play it safe.

There’s a cliché about Silicon Valley: No one even takes you seriously unless you’ve had two failed startups. If we want to make sure women can fill some of the 600,000 tech and computing jobs that are open right now, says Saujani, we have to encourage them to embrace risks.

So in 2012 she founded Girls who Code, and what she saw in the girls who came to their programs was a knee-jerk fear of failure. Coding is really a process of trial and error, she says, and success is achieved through perseverance and imperfection.

Many of her teachers, she reports, had the same experience: In the first week, a student would ask for help during a session, and she would show the teacher a blank screen. Had the student spent the past 20 minutes doing nothing? But when the teacher hit undo, it would uncover attempt after erased attempt to write code. “Instead of showing the progress that she made, she’d rather show nothing at all,” said Saujani of the students. “Perfection or bust.”

She recalls a friend who teaches Java at Columbia University who told Saujani that when her male students struggle, they say, “Professor, there’s something wrong with the code.” When female students come in, they say, “Professor, there’s something wrong with me.”

So it’s not enough to socialize girls to be imperfect—we also have to build a supportive network to cheer them on, and to tell them they’re not alone, says Saujani.

Only when we take the other half of our population with us, she says, will we be able to truly innovate. Says Saujani, let’s not wait for girls to learn to be brave at 33, as she did. She urges: “I need each of you to tell every young woman you know to be comfortable with imperfection.”

“Your lifestyle is the future of marketing,” Bob Lord told a group of young New Yorkers at the TED Annex (our new spillover office) on Tuesday night. About 80 interns and young professionals from local marketing firms came together to eat pizza and hear Lord’s advice on merging creativity and digital know-how, during a conversation with TED’s own Ronda Carnegie.

Lord is the global CEO of digital marketing agency Razorfish, but his bachelor’s degree is in engineering — and he describes his background in programming robots as crucial to the way he shapes brand experiences today. “Technology is the engine that makes marketing work,” he said, “Especially when you have the technical background to be able to say ‘API’ without being afraid of it.”

Following some nervous giggles in the room — there were definitely some API-phobes in the audience — Bob elaborated on the conceptual changes he has seen in the marketing industry during his career. Watching Mad Men is not the way to learn everything you need to know about marketing; instead, he suggests, Mad Men reflects a (fictionalized) past where employees held tightly to their own ideas, and “creating the brand perception of, say, the Marlboro Man was considered a great idea,” he said. Lord, it turns out, much prefers the contemporary model of a Foursquare/Starbucks collaboration, a digital pairing that contributes to their brands’ reality — and is actually useful for customers.

He notices that sometimes millennials — people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s — take their digital savvy for granted. “Just watching my kids do research is phenomenal,” he said, describing how they find and synthesize information from seemingly hundreds of websites. That ability to filter so much information, which some millennials have been doing for the majority of their lives, enables this newly adult generation to act as “what IDEO calls ‘T-shaped’ employees – specialists who can see the broad picture and objectives,” he said.

And after almost a lifetime of archiving their personal histories on social media, millennials have developed a sensibility for branding and storytelling that can be remarkably useful for companies. As Lord said, navigating the social media world has created a generation of experts in sniffing out disingenuous marketing campaigns, like the Qwikster fiasco.

With their innate sense of online authenticity, and their ability to filter and synthesize, millennials may have a leg up on modern marketing careers — but they can capitalize on it, Lord says, by developing their digital skills too. The biggest piece of advice from the CEO of a leading digital agency: Learn to code! A creative young person who also knows how to program will have the lay of the land at any progressive company.

If you are interested in learning more about the generation born between the early 1980s and 2000, check out these talks below: